Doing This One Thing Doubles Your Chances To Quit Smoking

According to the nation’s premier medical journal, doing this one thing doubles your chances of quitting tobacco use.

And anti-smoking zealots are furious.

It turns out that vaping doubles your chances of quitting smoking over every other therapy out there. It’s much better than Nicorette or the drugs pushed by big pharma.

Recently, the New England Journal of Medicine published research from Great Britain that showed incredible statistics from a randomized trial where participants quit smoking through vaping.

Of course, a majority of those in the medical profession are skeptical about the efficacy of e-cigarettes for smoking cessation and often cite the lack of clinical trials proving a benefit to smokers.

Unlike the U.S., Great Britain has embraced vaping to help people quit smoking and their National Institute of Health has yet to find any harm from vaping. They also estimate that it is 95% safer than smoking cigarettes.

Their study looked at several hundred smokers over a period of a year and found that nearly 20% of vapers were able to quit smoking, while less than 10% of those who used America’s FDA methods were successful.

Instead of rejoicing, the New England Journal of Medicine included two conflicting opinion pieces along with the study. One called for banning flavors of e-liquids and another that said the U.S. government has no proof that vaping helps people quit.

Randomized trials are usually used to test drugs intended to treat specific conditions. They typically compare two or more therapies with each other, or test drugs against a controlled group that receives a placebo.

The problem of using drug trial protocols on a consumer product like e-cigarettes is that the strict requirements (all participants must use a certain drug at a certain dose and interval) may not translate to products that succeed by offering a wide range of use among participants.

After all, vaping isn’t a cure for a disease, but rather a less-risky choice than smoking cigarettes.

There have been large smoking cessation trials using e-cigarettes before. However, the most recent were from 2014, and the data in those studies were collected even earlier from trials of first generation vaping products.

Nevertheless, even though those studies used primitive vaping devices, the results showed cessation success on par with nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) products.

Great Britain’s recent study, led by Prof. Peter Hajek of Queen Mary University of London, compared smokers attempting to quit with a vaping product to others using NRT.

And even though the participants who attempted to quit by vaping were given the choice of just one product, the results were impressive.

After one year, 18 percent of the vaping group was abstinent from cigarettes — almost twice as many as those who used the nicotine replacement products (9.9 percent). (Abstinence was verified with a carbon monoxide test, which shows evidence of recent smoking.)

“The figure may sound low,” notes Prof. Hajek, “but…if they were quitting on their own, the quit rate would be about 3 percent.”

This makes using vapes to quit (with proper advice and support) about six times more effective than quitting with no help at all.

Other researchers involved in the study came from Queen Mary and other British universities, as well as from an American institution.

The trial divided the 886 smokers into two groups. One group got their choice of nicotine replacement therapies (NRT) like nicotine patches, gum, lozenges, mouth strips, inhalers, and nasal spray. Additional NRT products were provided for free for three months and participants were allowed to use multiple products.

The other group was given a simple all-in-one vape kit (the Aspire One Kit or the Innokin One Kit 2016) with one or two 10 mL bottles of 18 mg/mL tobacco-flavored e-liquid.

The vaping group was instructed how to use and refill the device, and encouraged to buy additional e-liquids from a vape shop where they could choose other flavors (or even other devices).

Both groups had in-person counseling sessions weekly for the first month.

The vaping group had less intense cigarette cravings. They also experienced less nausea, and smaller increases in irritability and lack of concentration than the NRT group.

And among participants who had issues with coughing and phlegm when the trial began, significantly fewer in the vaping group had those symptoms after a year.

Vaping could save millions of people from premature death due to smoking, but big medicine will just not embrace this life saving technology.